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Creating Better TomorrowsFri, 27 Feb 2015 22:18:33 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.1Why Won’t They Listen?http://uniquevisions.net/2015/02/19/why-wont-they-listen/
http://uniquevisions.net/2015/02/19/why-wont-they-listen/#commentsThu, 19 Feb 2015 17:00:57 +0000http://uniquevisions.net/?p=203Ask any self-respecting social change agent about their issue and they will quickly drown you in data. They can reel off facts on how pervasive the problem is today, how fast it is growing, what segments of the population are at greatest risk, and most importantly, the exact date the problem will become an irreversible catastrophe. Usually this presentation ends with an impassioned plea that goes something like; “Problem X is HUGE and getting worse every minute, I just don’t understand why people are ignoring this. When are they going to realize that they have to (select one) eat less, eat local, eat organic, conserve energy, use alternative energy, save more, spend more, get screened, recycle, stop smoking, ……..Etc. Why don’t people get it?” And they are truly amazed that the rest of us are not moved to immediate action.

You almost feel sorry for them. You think that all this data would give them power. And in fact all the data we have at our fingertips these days is powerful. It helps us understand what can be done to create better tomorrows. But data does not create change. That requires a completely different kind of knowledge.

You have to start where your intended audience is, not where you want them to be. Instead of spending all your research effort on dissecting “the problem” spend a healthy chunk of it meeting your audience where they live. Approach them as an anthropologist might approach a foreign culture. Once there, you have to learn, really learn, about all the factors that influence their everyday decision making.

It doesn’t take very long to realize that your really HUGE problem is actually pretty minor in the face of day to day survival. The frighteningly high odds of falling victim to your problem really don’t mean much when the potential victim has a 100% chance of having to negotiate all the demands of modern life –family, job, putting food on the table, social status, education, crying babies, each and every day.

In short, life is full of challenges already. And it seems that everywhere you turn there is some harbinger of doom ready to demand that you put all those other problems aside right now and focus on the only one that really matters. Is it such a surprise that most people tune out, log into Facebook, and have a strong drink? The last thing most people have the capacity for is to take on another serious change effort.

Does this mean that all your good efforts are wasted? That the best you can ever hope for is change in the single digits of the population? That depends on what risks you’re willing to take. If you can’t escape from the literal-sclerosis that afflicts most social change agents then you likely will remain frustrated. On the other hand, if you can step outside the world of data and into the world of story you will be amazed by the power of your efforts.

Your first task as a storyteller is to really get to know your audience. That means at a personal, emotional level, not just as statistics and data points. This really is hard work. It can’t be done in a conference room brainstorming or sitting at a computer. It requires getting out there and getting dirty, getting close, walking a few miles in their shoes. Try it and you’ll be amazed by what you learn, even if you’ve always considered yourself an compassionate grassroots organizer.

Once you’ve completed that task then you need to ask yourself one question. “What does this audience need most?” Not as relates just to your issue but in the very broadest terms. When you can answer that question you’re ready to start the work of creating your story of a better tomorrow.

]]>http://uniquevisions.net/2015/02/19/why-wont-they-listen/feed/0Where did our Great Big Beautiful Tomorrows Go?http://uniquevisions.net/2015/02/19/where-did-our-great-big-beautiful-tomorrows-go/
http://uniquevisions.net/2015/02/19/where-did-our-great-big-beautiful-tomorrows-go/#commentsThu, 19 Feb 2015 16:54:36 +0000http://uniquevisions.net/?p=201Oh, how we used to love the future. We dreamed of flying cars, back yard nuclear reactors and even colonies in space. It was all going to be just so wonderful, we could hardly wait for tomorrow to get here.

So what happened? Why did we fall out of love with the opportunities that were just over the horizon? When did the future go from being a great big beautiful tomorrow to a looming nightmare of cataclysmic proportions?

To be honest, the end of the love affair had a lot to do with reality. Tomorrow got here and it turned out not to be quite as beautiful as we had imagined. Sure, the last century saw some incredible advances in technology; Advances that profoundly improved life for the vast majority of the world. There was a lot of unexpected baggage that showed up along with those improvements. By now, we know all the stories. Energy for everyone meant pollution everywhere. An explosion of cheap consumer goods led to landfills spreading across the countryside. And the list of unexpected byproducts of that optimistic future goes on and on.

It seems that the lesson we have taken from our excesses is that we must fear the future. We have come to accept as absolute truth that the worse possible scenarios are the most likely to occur. I’m pretty sure that’s neither an accurate, nor more importantly, useful lesson.

The great big beautiful tomorrow of the 20th century failed because of tunnel vision. Optimistic futurism was focused almost completely on the promise of big technology. In hindsight it’s easy enough to see that we were one dimensional in our visions of better tomorrows. But, to be fair, at the turn of the last century technology was producing some amazing revolutions. Imagine just how the widespread introduction of electricity, for example, must have felt at the time. As the world literally moved out of the dark ages, in just a few years, how could we have not been enraptured by the power of technology?

Now, we seem to have gone to the other extreme. Any optimistic vision of the future, whether technology fueled or not, is often dismissed as naïve or worse. We assume that anyone who promotes these positive visions must have some hidden agenda they are trying to sell us. But our postmodern cynicism is robbing us of the key element of those earlier visions – the power of optimism.

Quite simply, better tomorrows are never created out of fear. Creating change is difficult, even when we are guided by the most positive vision. Confronted with a choice of selecting the lesser evil, most people simply give up and wait for the Armageddon to arrive. The only hope we have of making substantive change is when we believe the end result will make the world better off than it is today. Positive visions are necessary to inspire people to do the hard work to build better tomorrows.

How do we create positive visions of the future without being intellectually naive? We must be able to combine our optimistic outlook with a systems view of the world. If we can avoid tunnel vision then we can create compelling, and realistic, visions that have the possibility of creating positive change.

Creating such balanced optimistic visions is difficult and time consuming. You have to begin the process by acknowledging the limitations of your current futureview. Take a look at the stories that already define your vision of tomorrow. Are they nightmares or dreams of a better world?

This is an example of story as tool for exploring the future. Originally presented at TEDxNASA@Silicon Valley.

Today is January 29, 2055. It’s a crisp sunny afternoon in Asheville North Carolina where we’re gathered at the home of Miguel Jose Rodriguez. Miguel turns 100 years old today.

He’s sitting right over there. I know you can’t believe this spry looking gentlemen wearing a crisply ironed guayabera and sipping a locally produced beer could possibly be a day over 80. That’s one of the advantages of living in 2055.

From all the noise you can tell Miguel is not alone today. Far from it. Five generations of his family have come together to celebrate this most important day.

Most of them didn’t have to travel very far. You see in this future, where work is distributed and often virtual, young adults don’t scatter in search of the good life. Families stay closer together.

So today, some of the younger partygoers walked the few blocks back to the family home. Others rode their electric bikes. Most of the older folks took the incredibly efficient mass transit. No one came by car. In fact, only a couple of the older uncles in the family even bother to own personal automobiles anymore. Why put up with the hassle when the local mass transit system is so good? Besides there are plenty of share car services available if you need one.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot. Miguel’s daughter Allison, she’s in the kitchen right now helping to fix the dinner. She came all the way from Atlanta. Her 200 mile trip took about 45 minutes on the new electric bullet train.

There are lots of things that Miguel enjoys about this world he’s living in. But, like most people his age, sometimes he just can’t resist talking about the Good Old Days. In fact, that’s what he’s doing right now to a group of quietly attentive great grandkids. They’ve heard these stories hundreds of times before, but Pap-Pap is entertaining and besides their mothers have all told them to be respectful or else. Some things aren’t so different in the future.

“You should have seen the house your Mamaw and I lived in, back in the day. Nearly 5000 square feet. It was so big that we could get lost in it. In fact, I remember the time we lost little Allison. We looked everywhere for almost half a day. Finally, Mamaw found her buried under an avalanche of clothes in her closet. That girl never could keep her room clean.”

Little Inez, Pap-Pap’s 13 -year old great granddaughter, always perks up when he gets to this part of the story. Like her great aunt Allison she loves clothes, but she can’t imagine anyone having enough clothes to cause an avalanche. What a waste of space and time that would be.

Inez designs almost all of her own clothes. She uses the family 3-d fabricator to print out the final product. Whenever she gets tired of an outfit she just chucks it in the recycler and it becomes the raw material for her next design.

The best part is when she posts her designs online for others to rate. She’s even had a couple of her outfits copied by other girls. Inez doesn’t dream of an avalanche of clothes, but an avalanche of thumbs up appearing next to her designs would be pretty cool.

Inez has been to the place where Pap-Paps house use to be, even though the houses are long gone–cleared away because it was too expensive to bring them up to modern environmental standards. In their place is one of the most beautiful parks in this city filled with green spaces.

She even knows what happened to some of Pap-Pap’s house. It was recycled to use in building the affordable city owned apartments where her friend Bobby lives. He might be more than just a friend but she’s not sure about that yet. She is sure that she is jealous of his way cool apartment complex.

It generates more than 100% of its energy onsite, has the latest rainwater recycling system and the most beautiful windmills in the entire city.

Inez’s daydream is interrupted by Pap-Pap’s booming voice. For an old man he can still command attention.

“One thing I don’t understand is why you kids don’t go to school. Why when I was your age I had to get up at daybreak every morning for nine months out of the year and trudge off to school. We took our education seriously.”

Inez tries not to laugh out loud. Some of Pap-Pap’s ideas are so old fashioned. Why would anyone only learn nine months out of the year? Inez is always learning, and she loves it. Right now she’s learning Mandarin from her friend, Kim, in Shanghai. She’s learning botany while working with her mom in the community garden. She can’t imagine how Pap-Pap could have learned anything sitting in a classroom all day.

“And another thing,” Pap-Pap is on a roll now. But here comes Inez’s mother, Susan, just in time to rescue the captive audience.

“C’mon kids we need help setting the table for dinner.”

Inez grabs the hand of her 5 year old cousin Lilly and escapes with the rest of the cousins.

Pap-Pap looks a little disappointed that he’s losing his audience, but he smiles. He knows they’ll be back soon enough.

I don’t know about you, but I would really love to live in that future and I believe that we can. We have the ability to create a world of Sustainable Abundance where it is possible for all of us to live fulfilling lives, to be part of stronger communities, and to enjoy higher levels of well-being without destroying our planet.

We’re already making some important strides in that direction. The green movement is certainly here to stay. But there is one piece of the puzzle that we have not paid enough attention to. If we really want to create a positive sustainable future we need to create a ‘New Story’ to go along with it.

I’m not suggesting a new green PR campaign of eco-propaganda or any of the conventional external ways we think about story. I’m talking about story that lives at such a deep level that we rarely acknowledge its existence. It’s a story that we often call, for lack of a better name, our culture. It informs our fears and our dreams, tells us what we value, and most importantly shows us how to put those values into practice.

The problem right now is that we are telling the wrong stories about sustainability. We focus on impending doom and disaster. We believe that we can scare humanity into going green.

Our sustainable future does not have to be so bleak. It can be a world filled with abundance, where sustainability is a core value. This is not some vision of a far-fetched green utopia. It is grounded in what is possible.

This new story will keep the best of the past, recognize the realities of today, and provide us a blueprint for building a better tomorrow. In this world sustainability will be accessible to everyone, not just a privileged few who can afford to pay a green premium.

For the past century we have defined abundance in terms of consumption. We have been persuaded that prosperity was directly linked to having more things. We now know that this mindset has caused very real damage to our planet.

What we are learning is that it hasn’t been doing much for us either. A whole slew of recent studies suggest that the link between material wealth and well-being is much more tenuous than we believed. In fact, many of those studies find that after a certain level the relationship is actually negative. The more stuff we have the less happy we are. It turns out that if everyone in the world had as much stuff as the average American we would have 6 billion very unhappy people living on one very unhealthy planet.

Sustainable Abundance does not reject materialism. It recognizes the real value and true cost of objects. Let’s be honest, to live in this world we will have to give up our Hummers and McMansions. In their place we will design objects that have both beauty and utility, are built to last and easily repurposed when their usefulness has ended.

Some would argue that we cannot afford a world of Sustainable Abundance. They see consumption as the only path to economic growth. That view is locked in an old story where economics is a zero-sum game. If I win you must lose.

An abundance economy is based on monetizing those things that are not limited — knowledge, creativity, innovation, and altruism. It is up to us to decide the relative value of things vs. ideas vs. social participation. There has been much talk about a new triple line balance sheet for business. Why not the same for individuals and families and communities? Why shouldn’t happiness have a value? As we redefine success to include being a part of the community, finding time to laugh, love and live fully, we will find new ways to extend the good life to many more people. Isn’t that the real purpose of any economy?

This World of Sustainable Abundance is within our reach. Many people are already working to help create it. These individuals are already living our new story. Most of them can’t articulate it, many don’t even realize it, but they are the heroes of this positive future.

It is time for the rest of us to step up and join them in creating this story. We must share with others our vision for a world of Sustainable Abundance. We must begin to show that we really do value equity, individual fulfillment, and protecting our planet. By our words and actions we can inspire humanity to embrace this new story.

Speaking of our story, let’s check back in on Pap-Pap’s birthday celebration.

Looks like the kids did a great job of setting that table. Wow that is some spread. The table is covered with homegrown and locally sourced foods, handmade breads and homemade pies.

The family band, a group of cousins, aunts, and uncle, who share a love for playing music, are warming up. In just a few minutes they’ll be playing Happy Birthday.

Pap-Pap’s sitting at the head of the table, eyes slightly closed, tapping his foot along to the music. He has a big smile on his face and I know what he’s thinking. He’s proud of his family. They’ve created a world that really is much better than the good old days. He’s just glad he’s here to share it with them.